"Dirty Dancing" Is White Enough -- Part 1

The book The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture, published in 2013, edited by Yannis Tzioumakis and Siân Lincoln, is a collection of scholarly essays about the movie.

The cover of the book
"The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture"

I already have published twelve blog articles about the book and its articles:

Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture

Is Dirty Dancing a Musical?

Straightness and Dirtiness in Dirty Dancing

Generic Hybridity in Dirty Dancing

Dirty Dancing as a Teenage Rite-of-Passage Film

Dirty Dancing as Reagan-era Cinema and "Reaganite Entertainment"

Anachronistic Music in Dirty Dancing

Dressing and Undressing in Dirty Dancing: Consumption, Gender, and Visual Culture in the 1980s

Dirty Dancing: Feminism, Postfeminism and Neo-Feminism

"(I've Had) The Time of My Life": Romantic Nostalgia and the Early 1960s

"There Are a Lot of Things About Me That Aren't What You Thought": The Politics of Dirty Dancing

"It's a Feeling; A Heartbeat": Nostalgia, Music, and Affect in Dirty Dancing

Now I will review another of the book's articles -- "White Enough", written by Richard Dyer.

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Richard Dyer

The book identifies Richard Dyer as follows:

Richard Dyer teaches film studies at King's College London and the University of St. Andrews. He is working on a book on serial killers in European Cinema and on La dolce vita.

I will summarize this article in this Part 1 and then criticize it fundamentally in Part 2.

I will use the words Negro and Caucasian because those were the polite words in the early 1960s.

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In my own words, I summarize the article's essence as follows:

The movie's "dirty dancing" is based on Negro musical culture, but the movie shows practically no Negroes. (The only substantial Negro character is Tito Sanchez, the band leader.)

However, the absence of Negroes is justified by the movie's historical realism.

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The article's first three pages generally relates the movie's dancing to the movie's sexual activities. The movie includes both clean dancing and dirty dancing. Examples of the clean dancing happen in the hotel's ballroom, where the dancing "lacks any sense of overt sexual drive". Examples of the dirty dancing happen in the staff quarters, where the dancing has "an explicit sexual dimension".

Dyer points out "two exceptions to the sense of dance as sexual".

* The bandleader Tito Sanchez's "delicate, easy dancing" with Max Kellerman during the first-night dance.

* Johnny's and Baby's performance at the Sheldrake Hotel.

Johnny and Baby dance together at the Sheldrake only because Penny must be away. The Sheldrake performance does not express a sexual relationship between Johnny and Baby.

In contrast to the Sheldrake performance, the talent-show performance at the movie's end does express a sexual relationship between Johnny and Baby. Her leap into the air symbolizes "the transcendence of orgasm". Her leap into the air inspires all the people in the talent-show audience to join the dancing "in a routine closer in spirit to communal celebration ... to let their hair down in the key of sexuality...."

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Then the article addresses the movie's racial aspects. He divides the characters into two groups -- white and not-so-white -- which generally correspond to the clean and dirty dancing. This division gives the movie an "explicit, albeit unspoken, racial/ethnic component". He points out:

The Johnny character was initially Italian-American and ultimately Irish-American.

Latin-American dancing is mentioned and featured throughout the movie.

Lisa dances a Hawaiian dance.

The dancers in the staff quarters are racially mixed.

Dyer summarizes that "a great deal of the dancing ... is coded as not-quite-white". Then he refines that generalization more specifically:

... historically, where the [movie's dirty] dance comes from -- albeit mixed with other sources, albeit filtered and exaggerated by white perceptions -- is African-American musical culture.

Although the movie's dirty dancing supposedly comes from Negro culture, however, there are only glimpses of Negroes dancing -- or doing anything else -- in the movie. This discrepancy is the main theme of Dyer's article.

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Although Negro characters are absent from the movie, Negro music pervades the movie. Dyer specifies:

The soundtrack uses songs of the period, with a high proportion of black artists:

* The Ronettes ("Be My Baby")

* The Contours (“Do You Love Me?”)

* Otis Redding (“Love Man,” “These Arms of Mine”)

* Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs (“Stay”)

* The Drifters (“Some Kind of Wonderful”)

* Solomon Burke (“Cry to Me”)

* The Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”)

* Mickey and Sylvia (“Love Is Strange”)

* Merry Clayton (“Yes”)

* The Five Satins (“In the Still of the Night

This is eleven black tracks contrasted against another six white ones:

* Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons ("Big Girls Don't Cry")

* Tom Johnston (“Where Are You Tonight?”)

* Eric Carmen (“Hungry Eyes”)

* Zappacosta (“Overload”)

* Bruce Channel (“Hey! Baby”)

* The Blow Monkeys (“You Don’t Own Me”)

Frankie Valli and Zappacosta are Italian-American, and there is also the Hispanic group Melon providing “De Todo un Poco” for Johnny and Baby’s Sheldrake number, beefing up the not-quite-white quotient.

Dyer seems to indicate that the movie's Negro music and associated dirty dancing are relatively more sexual.

The black tracks are especially significant in terms of sexuality. The first dirty dancing Baby sees is done to the Contours, which not only suggests dance as a progression to love (“Do you love me now that I can dance?”) but also links this in the lyrics to specific black, and probably dirty, dances: the Mashed Potato and the Twist (both emphasising the groin area).

Baby’s first dance with Johnny, which creates a certain sexual frisson (already set up by her interested looks at him), is to Redding’s “Love Man.” Their first love-making is to Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me”; a later post-coital sequence has the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” playing in the background, and another sexually charged sequence involves, as noted above, Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange?"

In contrast, the movie's Caucasian music is relatively less sexual.

The white artists’ tracks have little weight in the sexual narrative, the most important being Eric Carmen and Bruce Channel accompanying Baby learning Penny’s part for the Sheldrake show

When sex seems to be rearing its head (Johnny standing behind Baby and making a caressing movement down her arm), she keeps breaking into giggles and he becomes increasingly frustrated; when they may sense that something more than professional is developing between them, when they are practicing lifts in a lake, “(I’ve Had) lie Time of My life” seeps in unsung on the soundtrack. The latter, along with Swayze’s “She Like the Wind?” are the culmination of the sexual/romantic narrative:

* “She’s Like the Wind” is first heard when Johnny and Baby say goodbye, and

* “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” is he music for their, and eventually everyone’s, dance at the final show.

(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” is sung by the it-doesn’t-get-whiter-than-this duo Bill Medley and Jennifer Wanes. It’s a number written for the film and, stylistically, clearly from the period in which the film was made rather than when it was set; it is also perhaps as far from black influence as it is possible for pop music to get (which is to say, course, not utterly untouched by it).

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Dyer then discusses the discrepancy between the absence of Negro characters and the pervasiveness of Negro music and dancing. The movie is largely realistic, but with a few "utopian impulses". In my own words, the realism is that no or only a few Negroes would be present in the 1963-Jewish-resort situation that the movie depicts. The utopianism is that more Negroes should have been present. Some utopianism is justified, because the musical genre is rather utopian. Dyer writes:

.... realism prevents the film from getting very far with this [the inclusion of Negroes] for fear of falling into improbability. ....

Dirty Dancing is in some ways quite surprisingly realist in its delineation of the class and gender politics of its period.

But it is also musical, and one that draws more and more on the genre’s utopian impulses as it goes along. The story of the girl plucked from obscurity (whether in the chorus or not) to become a star is a perennial theme of dance-based films ....

Folding everyone into community [everyone joining the dance at the end of the movie] is also a trope of the musical. ... Both of these tropes, as they are used in Dirty Dancing, have little to do with realism. Moreover, as they involve a musical move toward the 1980s ... it might have been possible to let go of plausibility vis-a-vis the racial divisions of the early 1960s.

The final, talent-show scene combines the realism with some "utopian impulses'.

In fact, what happens is that there is a whitening of the film, both visually and musically. The choreographic climax of Johnny and Frances’ final number occurs when she leaps up and is caught and held aloft by him ... In racial terms, Frances, spread out above Johnny. dominating the frame, is bathed in a dazzling white light that makes her look blonder, the apotheosis of the traditional affinity between light and white female glamour.

The transformation of their number into the final community/production number is initiated and led by Johnny in a move more common in action movies over the past twenty years, where women and non-whites are gathered in but always under the leadership of a white man ....

On one hand, Baby's personal whiteness is exaggerated, but on the other hand, the ultimate communal celebration dance includes all the mixed-race employees.

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Dyer then compares Negro and Jewish histories. Both groups were stigmatized, outcast and isolated from the surrounding, dominant cultures. Therefore Jews felt some affinity with and appreciation toward Negro culture. In particular, Jewish artists borrowed from and promoted Negro artistry during the first half of the 20th Century.

During the second half of the 20th Century, however, Jews assimilated into the dominant culture much faster and more successfully than Negroes did. The movie depicts successful Jews who have assimilated well, even though they vacation at a resort hotel that still, in 1963, hosts mostly Jews.

By 1987, when the movie was released, movie audiences were largely ignorant of the Jews' long-ago special affinity with Negroes. The movie does depict the friendship of Max Kellerman and Tito Suarez, but did not attempt to portray these Jewish characters still sharing in 1963 a special affinity with Negro music and dancing. Furthermore, the movie's Jewish aspect was minimized.

Dyer writes:

It would be possible to see Dirty Dancing and not register the fact that it has a Jewish setting. ... The Jewish setting gives particular resonances to the present-absent African-American elements in at least a couple of ways.

* One relates to the long history of Jews and black music in the USA, discussed by Jeffrey Melnick in his A Right to Sing the Blues (1999). Many works that defined African-American musical identity for a wider audience were produced by Jews ....

* By the time of Dirty Dancing, [there was a] shift in the perception of Jews in America away from the ghetto and the oppression-sharing status of racial inferiority. There [was a new Jewish] distance between segregation and a model of assimilation, in which Jewishness all but disappears in the light of whiteness.

This move is also enacted in the narrative. By dancing, sleeping, and siding with Johnny, Frances is making a bid to marry out, having at the start been paired by her parents and the resort with a nice Jewish boy with good prospects. .... We do not of course know if Johnny and Frances will marry ... but the conventions of romance suggest this is the logical development. Strictly speaking, Frances marrying a Gentile ... does not preclude the reproduction of Jewishness, but it certainly muddies the waters ....

Perhaps the persistence of Dirty Dancing’s nostalgia for a time of optimism, liberalism, and emerging sexual freedom is also nostalgia for a time when all of that could still take place under the sign of whiteness.

In my article's Part 2, I will criticize Dyer's article.